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At Phillips Exeter Academy, Drew babysat for 25¢ an hour to eke out a scholarship. At Swarthmore, he made Phi Beta Kappa, edited the college newspaper, Phoenix, and was in an Officers' Training Corps as World War I ended. In 1919 his father got him an overseas job with the American Friends Service Committee, at $6 a month. He spent two years rebuilding devastated Balkan villages; one was gratefully renamed Pearsonavatz.
At 24, after a fling at teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, he wanted to get in the newspaper game "halfway up the ladder, instead of at the bottom." Shipping out of Seattle, he worked his way around the world as a seaman, lecturer and correspondent for a few U.S. and Australian papers. A day out of Suez, he got a request from an obscure syndicate to interview Europe's "twelve greatest men." For the $2,000 expense money, he trotted around to the dozen greats (Mussolini to Lord Balfour), and came home in style on the Aquitania. His series got him a job in Washington, where he wound up on the Baltimore Sun.
Tales Out of School. Midway in the lean Hoover years, an anonymous book called Washington Merry-Go-Round hit the dowager city on the Potomac like mud in the face. It brutally ridiculed almost everybody in town. A conspicuous few were spared. Among them: redheaded, short-tempered Robert Sharon Allen, young boss of the "competent conscientious" Christian Science Monitor bureau—and Drew Pearson. The book said: "[Pearson] has the reputation of knowing more about the State Department than most of the people who run it ... Because of his independence he is either loved or hated; there is no middle ground of affection where Pearson is concerned."
The puffs gave the authors away. Allen was fired by the Monitor. When More Merry-Go-Round, (also anonymous) came out, Pearson lost his job with the Sun, chiefly, he believes, because the book portrayed Secretary of War Patrick Jay Hurley as "the Cotillion Leader," who rehearsed his drawing-room entrances & exits with his wife, in fron of a mirror.
The books sold 185,000 copies and convinced Pearson & Allen that there was a market for their kind of impudent reporting. Roy Howard's United Feature Syndicate started their Merry-Go-Round column on Dec. 12, 1932. New Dealers Pearson & Allen began at $25 a week apiece, were soon cozy enough with the Democrats to call the turn of New Deal cards. By the end of 1933, 225 newspapers had clambered aboard the Merry-Go-Round. As it whirled it shook Washington journalism out of its easygoing way of reporting the news by handout.
Brass Rings & Knuckles. In the hardhitting team, profane and truculent Bob Allen was the mailed fist. Polite, mild-mannered Drew Pearson was the silk glove that came around next day to stroke the bruises—and pick up any information Allen had missed. Between them they piled up an enviable list of scoops (F.D.R.'s court-packing plan, the destroyers-for-bases deal, the 1939 Louisiana scandals, etc.).